


By the Waters of Lethe

by cachinnation



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-05
Updated: 2014-03-05
Packaged: 2018-01-14 15:38:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1271989
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cachinnation/pseuds/cachinnation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A what-if.  Charles talks to the ghosts in his head -- or, rather, one particular ghost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By the Waters of Lethe

**Author's Note:**

> A fill for the following prompt on one of the lj kinkmemes:  
> Charles's power somehow backfired and wreaked havoc on his own mind. Now he talks constantly to/about someone named Erik, who he thinks of as his protector and lover. Erik is as real to Charles as any other person, but to everyone else, he's just a ghost.

Charles wakes to a fresh sun, and everything is so clean and pure that he can’t help asking, “Is this heaven?”

“No,” a voice answers, and he turns his head to see Erik standing by the narrow window, the morning sunlight teasing hints of gold from his hair. “You’re at home, just like every other morning.” He’s not sure he believes that, but he supposes that if Erik were an angel he wouldn’t be wearing a black turtleneck.

Charles looks around at the white ceiling, the white, soft walls and floor (they could be clouds,) the white of the sheets, and even the white of the straps that wind around his wrists and ankles and the frame of his bed. Under them, his own pale skin offers a touch of variety by way of raw redness.

“Was it a bad night last night?” he asks quietly, the darkness just a vague memory.

“Yes,” answers Erik gently, stepping over and brushing a kiss on his forehead. “It rained last night, torrents of it.”

“I’m sorry,” says Charles as if he is the one who makes the rain that saddens Erik.

“It’s a good thing there is always morning,” Erik tells him, and he leaves it at that.

Erik goes and stands by the window again when the nurses come in, cautious and quiet today, to loose Charles from his bonds and bring him breakfast. He doesn’t look outside this time, though; his eyes never leave Charles while they tend to him. They’re more nervous than usual, even though Charles has told them again and again that they don’t need to be afraid of Erik. Erik is terribly strong, but he would never hurt good men, innocent men.

Breakfast is simple: oatmeal with raisins, a cup of fruit, and a glass of cold milk. They hand him a plastic spoon and stand by the door while he eats. Erik doesn’t want any, though he offers every time. Erik never seems hungry, but Charles is sure he takes what he wants from the kitchens at night. Maybe he even cooks for himself.

“Will _you_ make me dinner someday?” he asks before he can stop himself, and a nurse jumps slightly, thinking for a moment that the question is directed at him.

Erik takes no notice of the man. “Would you want that?” he asks Charles.

Charles offers him a smile as radiant as the sun streaming through the glass and wire mesh. “Of course I would. Something nice, elegant, paired with a good wine. Or wines, depending on the courses.”

Erik laughs briefly, deep in his throat, affectionate. “You sorely overestimate my culinary abilities. I was thinking something more along the lines of spaghetti. Eat your oatmeal before it gets cold and sticks together.”

Charles does, daydreaming of candles and lace tablecloths and sweet white wines. He drinks the milk in two gulps, closing his eyes as the cold slips down inside his chest and births a sudden little ache behind his forehead. Erik’s warm hands brush his tousled bangs and soothe it all away. He hadn’t even heard him walk over from the window.

“Do you want to go to the recreation room now, Mr. Xavier?” asks a nurse. Charles has told them all to use his first name, but they remain polite and professional.

“Yes, I think that would be good,” he agrees. “I think it would do Erik good to get out of this room for a bit, especially after the rain.”

They nod, and an orderly brings in a silver wheelchair. There is nothing wrong with Charles’s legs, but the bad nights always leave him too tired to move much on his own for a day or two. It doesn’t matter to him, though; Erik will walk by his side whether he strides or glides, and Erik will always be taller.

In his mind, Charles calls the recreation room “the parlor” because it seems far more appropriate. “Recreation” always seems to imply that there should be more than a table, a few chairs, a view of the grounds, and a board game or two. But it’s quiet and peaceful and only for him and Erik except when he has visitors.

“Your sister is coming to see you today,” says the nurse pushing his wheelchair down the white hall, as if nudged by Charles’s musings. 

“She’ll be here soon,” adds Erik. He always knows what is happening.

\--

_Raven arrived in the morning as usual, dressed neatly with her golden hair flowing loose down her back. Charles’s primary doctor met her at the front door as he always did for families of patients with money. Charles may have been scatterbrained about some things, but at least he had made the proper legal arrangements for her to manage the Xavier fortune in the case anything should happen to him, as unlikely as that seemed._

_Her adoptive brother had been bright and energetic, having just wrapped up his thesis on genetic mutation, flirting with all the girls at the bar, his whole life ahead of him. He talked constantly about looking for a professorship, about molding young minds for the future, and about when he should get his hair trimmed next._

_He had been so thrilled when the CIA approached him and asked him to consult on a case hunting down a war criminal with associates who might have mutant powers. The CIA higher-ups had been skeptical to say the least, but they had put the two of them in an offsite facility overnight while they finalized their leads. Agent MacTaggert, who had found Charles, wanted to start off right away but couldn’t obtain the necessary approval._

_Charles did not seem to particularly mind, though; the secure facility turned out to be the home of another mutant, one Hank McCoy. A beautiful genius, he had captured Charles and Raven’s attention immediately and shyly allowed Charles’s enthusiasm to draw him in as well. He began to share his little projects with them, eyes shining as he described new breakthroughs in supersonic flight and radar._

_When he found out about Charles’s telepathy, he could barely contain his excitement. “I made something to enhance brain waves!” he exclaimed, all but dragging them to the construction behind the facility. “You could touch minds hundreds of miles away, and you might even be able to find other mutants with it!”_

_Charles couldn’t refuse that. Everything about the contraption enthralled him, from the panels full of lights and buttons to the measuring instruments to the headpiece itself. Most of all, he was in love with the idea of discovering others and gathering them._

_It seemed to work so well at first. Charles’s expression lit up as the machine did, his face shining with a breathless grin like one plunging off a high dive. Then his eyes narrowed as he focused on something, someone only he could sense, and Raven watched him strain, wanting, desiring…._

_There was a snap of wires like gunfire, showering them with sparks as all the lights blinked out at once. The screens crackled and filled with deafening static, but Charles’s wail rose above it all. Raven thought he might have been calling out a name._

_When the smoke cleared and they reached him, Charles was unconscious and unmoving, dead but for the faintest hint of a pulse. There were burns on his temples, ugly and crimson. Raven found herself unable to speak while Hank repeated empty, horrified apologies over and over again._

_The next twenty-four hours were a terrible blur of sirens, needles, and tubes. No one would tell her what was happening, how he was, if he would survive._

_Finally, when he woke, they allowed her at his bedside. His head was swathed in bandages, and his face was pale and drawn. His skin seemed taut over his bones, thin and fearsomely delicate. He looked at her blankly when she sat down and placed her hand on his. “How are you feeling, Charles?”_

_He did not respond but studied her in silence with a curious expression._

_“It’s me, Charles,” she said, willing herself not to weep. “It’s your sister Raven.”_

_He paused as if thinking, then nodded slowly. It was not an expression of recognition, but of one who has decided to play along. “Erik,” he said to the empty space on the other side of the bed, “this is my sister Raven.”_

\--

Charles has the orderlies draw up a chair next to him by the window for Erik. “The sky is so blue,” he marvels simply. “You’d never suspect it was storming last night.”

“It makes the grass glitter,” agrees Erik with a sly twitch of the mouth. 

“I like our home,” remarks Charles. “Don’t you think it’s a bit silly that Raven doesn’t want to live here with us?”

“I don’t mind,” says Erik with a shrug. “It’s best with just the two of us.”

Charles shakes his head fondly. “She likes you fine,” he reassures Erik. “I suppose she had to get used to you being with me, but she doesn’t hate you. She doesn’t ignore you so much now.”

“I don’t need her approval,” Erik states, chin raised. “You’re enough. But doesn’t it bother you that your own sister sometimes looks right through me?”

“She’s warming up to you, don’t worry,” insists Charles. “She always greets you when she visits now.”

“Yes, you trained her well on that one.”

“Oh, leave off,” laughs Charles. “She’s visiting today; do try to get along.”

“Only for you,” says Erik, his hand heavy and gentle on Charles’s shoulder. “Do you feel like a game of chess while we wait?”

Charles nods and wheels over to the board game cabinet. “I am always up for a game of chess. I have some new ideas that might surprise you.”

Erik grins. “I have some new counter-ideas that might surprise you. I know how you think better than you might realize.”

It’s true. They play game after game of chess nearly every day, always perfectly matched. Sometimes it is almost like a dance, one leading and then the other, moving in curious unison to a melody audible only to them.

\--

_With Charles still in the hospital, the CIA moved without them. Raven was almost thankful for Charles’s injury when she heard how the whole thing had turned out. The wanted man did indeed have mutant associates, and they decimated the government forces. Survivors said whirlwinds sprang out of the still night, overturning boats and driving men under the water. Others said they had seen an anchor rise from the water of its own accord and destroy the evidence left on the yacht even as all the criminals escaped by submarine._

_What had been a perfectly planned and coordinated mission quickly turned into a fatal disaster, leaving the coast guard no choice but to turn its attention to rescuing its own. In the end, they had nothing to show for their efforts but the corpses of their fellow men._

_The next day, the recovery team also pulled the body of a drowned civilian from the water. No one had seen him during the raid or on the yacht, and he had no identification on him that might offer any clues. There was only the set of numbers inked into his left forearm, silent evidence of the horrors he must have witnessed and endured just a few years ago. There was no reason to think he had any significance in the case at hand, though, so they buried him without a name in a public plot._

_Had Charles been whole and able, Raven thought with a shiver, he would have joined the raid, and who knows what might have happened then._

_She made arrangements for him to stay in his own private facility. It was connected to a prestigious mental hospital with all its doctors and nurses, but she kept a close eye on their procedures and remedies. Discussion groups and electroshock therapy might be good and well for suffering humans, but she did not believe they would do much to remedy psychic damage._

_All she asked was for a quiet environment and the best care for him while she grappled with the aftermath of his life-saving injury._

\--

Raven is all affectionate smiles when she walks in the room and hugs Charles, remembering to add a “hello, Erik” into the greetings. Charles is pleased to note that she doesn’t even sound too resigned about it. Erik, too, doesn’t seem sulky about the interruption of their chess game, which is a good sign.

Then Raven is running her fingertips over the heel of his palm, clicking her tongue at the chafed redness on his wrists. “Oh, Charles, again?”

“It rained,” says Charles with a shrug. Bad nights seem to upset everyone around them, but he and Erik are always there for each other in the morning, and he barely remembers what happens after it’s over. He doesn’t like the sadness in Raven’s eyes or the excessive caution of the orderlies, though.

“Do you think it would help if we put heavy curtains over the window?” she asks. “Or if we found you a room without windows for a while?”

Erik shakes his head. “No, we like the window,” Charles tells her, clasping her hand. “It’s not so bad, really. You shouldn’t worry so much.”

She blinks a few times, ducking her head as the corners of her mouth tighten. “But maybe it would make you feel better. Maybe someday you can come home again.”

He smiles brightly, innocently. “You mean your home?”

She nods, silent.

“I’ve told you, I like my home here,” he tells her honestly. “Erik takes care of me. You don’t have to worry.”

“Your guardian angel,” says Raven, sweetly, sadly, and Charles just nods and laughs. Erik is only a man, he knows, but he also understands how that might be difficult to comprehend. “Don’t you remember the mansion?” she asks after a pause.

He thinks about that for a while, exchanging a look with Erik. “Tell us about the mansion, Raven.”

And when she describes the curving staircases, the secret libraries, and the rolling green grounds, he almost thinks he can recall it. More than that, he wants to go there with Erik.

\--

_The government wanted to take Charles away, to lock him up in a lab and find out what made his mind work the way it did, even in its broken state. There were whispers of “mind control” and “scientific advances” and codenames like “MK-ULTRA,” but she didn’t trust them._

_They grew more insistent, throwing in more direct phrases like “civic duty” and “for the good of the country” and “before the Reds do.” In the end, though, all the Xavier prestige, money, and lawyers put an end to that. Raven was at the head, directing the charge, edging forward this prestigious firm or that tip to the newspapers. Charles was not the only one in the family who could play chess._

_Yet the war was not over. New battles sprang up, new fashionable treatments, new doctors trying to be innovative or hoping for a chance to experiment. She hated them as much as she needed them to stand guard around Charles’s bed when she could not._

_If only Erik were not some figment of Charles’s agony! He seemed like he would have been someone she could like. But at least he offered comfort where he could not offer protection. She remembered when Charles used to laugh with her like that, back when emptiness was emptiness and not Erik._

_“We think a lobotomy might cure or at least mitigate his delusions,” said the doctor quietly, breaking into her reverie._

_“No,” interrupted Raven, suddenly, firmly._

_“Miss Darkholme, we’re trying to help him.”_

_“No lobotomy is going to bring back the Charles that was,” she told him. “His ‘delusions’ are all that he has now, and I won’t let you take those away from him.”_

\--

Charles does not know how the time passes, only that most days are blissfully gentle until the rains come again. He and Erik do not mind the gray drizzles that mist over the sunset, their susurrus sifting through the windowpane to their ears. 

But when the slate clouds turn black and the droplets become a downpour, Erik’s expression also darkens. He turns away from Charles, hoping he won’t see, but that only hurts more.

Charles does see. He has no idea why it happens, but the clean white walls vanish and he stands with Erik, ankle-deep in sucking mud, fenced in with rough wood and barbed wire.

There are others there too: thin, faceless wraiths standing all around them, their shoulders slumped, heads hanging. Sickly smoke mixes with the low clouds, the smell of rot and burning never quite washing away with the rain.

Monsters stalk the darkness around them, hard and unfeeling, eyeing them only as prey, as objects in a line. Sometimes they pounce and snatch away the wraiths, and the screaming is sharp enough to slice Charles’s skull open.

Then they come for the shadows closest to Erik, and Charles cannot think anything except that they _must not_. The pain might be his, might be Erik’s, but all he wants is to reach out and rip away the monsters. There is nothing he can do, and that is worst of all. It always ends with him lying choking in the mud, head throbbing, angry and helpless.

Sometimes he is vaguely aware of doctors and nurses rushing about him in his white room, seizing his flailing limbs and securing them to his bed, but none of it is as real as the pounding rain. He screams until his throat is raw, but nothing will hurt the monsters or bring back what they took.

When he loses sight of Erik, the fear is the worst of all. He is left with the nothingness and darkness, and no one will come for him but the terrible, tearing claws and heavy boots. He thinks that at any moment it will be too much, and they will find him blank and surrendering when they drag him away, but every nerve is still alive and burning when the blackness closes in.

But Erik always finds him again in the morning when the storm clears, so they let the world move on without them.

And move it does.

\--

_On October 25, American missiles destroyed a Soviet ship trying to pass the embargo to Cuba. Raven watched the doomsday criers on the black and white television, listened to the reports of threats and panics, and then switched off the screen. She immediately called the facility where Charles stayed._

_“I want to remove my brother from your care,” she said as soon as the head doctor was on the line. “Perhaps you’ve seen the news. I mean no offense when I say there is nothing more you can do for him.”_

_“I quite understand,” said the doctor, sounding relieved. “In fact, well, I shouldn’t be disclosing this, but the board is going to meet tomorrow to discuss closing the facility. Most of the caregivers and other employees have suddenly found their priorities dramatically rearranged and a number have left to be with their families already. We may not have sufficient manpower to maintain Mr. Xavier’s private, secluded care. We would certainly like to thank you for entrusting us with him for this time, though--”_

_“I’ll pick him up this afternoon,” cut in Raven brusquely. In the end, none of it had mattered. The US and the Soviets hadn’t needed telepathy or mind control to sign a death warrant for the whole planet. They could have left them alone this whole time._

_She brought Charles home from the hospital, took him to the bomb shelter in the basement, and waited for the world to end._

\--

Charles feels as if the concrete room should be familiar to him, but the piles of canned foods and other necessities obscure the curve of the walls, and he can’t be sure. Raven paces silently, and sometimes she cries when she thinks he isn’t paying attention.

He looks up at Erik, who smiles softly and takes his hand.

“This doesn’t look like heaven as much as home does,” Charles remarks placidly.

Erik brushes small circles around his knuckles with his thumb. “Let me tell you about heaven,” he says.


End file.
